CPU Socket Guide 2012

Introduction

The most annoying part of building your own PC at home is matching up the parts. This motherboard doesn’t support that processor, that video card in incompatible with that motherboard… the list goes on and on. Way back when I had a dial-up network card that I had to keep uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers for every time I restarted the computer. It got old, but I wasn’t smart enough back then to realize that it was probably my computer’s way of saying “I don’t like that P.O.S.”. And it was a piece of crap, too. And I didn’t have enough sense to make sure it was compatible.

Fast forward seventeen years later, I still do stuff like that. I see a heck of a deal on Amazon or Ebay, and I can’t fish my credit card out fast enough. I have three video capture cards from the HTPC build I did a few years back that didn’t work with my setup. They were slow, or simply incompatible. And that’s also how I ended up with my little box of CPUs. Each in its own ESD bag, each with no motherboard to pair with it, because even after all these years, I still buy things on impulse and not check if my mobo’s socket is compatible with that flashy microprocessor I found online.

So in order to keep you all from making the same mistakes as myself, we are going to give you all a grand tour of the latest sockets and their most compatible processors. It makes building a new gaming or work rig so much easier if you don’t have to return a motherboard or processor for a refund and order a new one. Knowledge is power, as well as money.